


Frankincense & Myrrh; Cinnamon & Cloves

by Eustace (Sibylline)



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Catholicism, Christmas, Christmas Cookies, Feelings, Gen, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Matt Murdock/Happiness - Freeform, fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 21:06:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5513336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibylline/pseuds/Eustace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Matt makes Christmas cookies with Foggy and Karen, and gifts a few to Father Lantom. Because food is love. Cookies with a light dusting of angst and Catholicism. unbeta'd, unproofread, and so forth.</p><p>Merry Christmas, Matt Murdock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frankincense & Myrrh; Cinnamon & Cloves

Matt can feel the winter settling down into the city now, despite the lingering dregs of fall in the air. He likes winter, likes the way that the cold settles the smells, likes the way that every sound travels so clearly in frost-brittle air.

And, the truth is, Matt likes Christmas.

As a kid at the orphanage, the melting of the candles of the advent wreath marked the slow burn of days until Christmas. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel it in the air, sense the heat, feel it in his bones. At Mass, on Christmas Eve, when they lit the candles and dimmed the lights to pass the flame, there in the dark, everyone sang the strongest when they thought no one could hear them, sending up their voices to the dark vault of the rafters. The church smelled of pine and candlewax and faint incense.

Currently, the church smells of pine and candlewax and faint espresso, because Father Lantom is making use of the coffee machine, and the advent wreath marks less than a week until Christmas. Mass is over, and Matt figures that it doesn’t really count as lurking if you’re bringing someone a gift. Because if it did, that would place Santa Claus in the lurker category. Did Matt just compare himself to Santa? He should get this over with.

Karen picked out the gift bags; the advantage of black is that it matches everything and barely shows blood; the disadvantage of black is that it doesn’t qualify as a Christmas color. Frankly, he doesn’t trust Foggy to pick anything color-wise; it’s hard to know whether Foggy picks hideously-patterned wrapping paper, ties, gift bags because he thinks it’s funny, or because he honestly believes that they look good. Matt is reasonably sure that everything is in order, and the espresso sounds and smells done. And maybe he’s a little nervous, hoping that Father Lantom is pleased with the gift, which: he’s a vigilante who is unafraid of breaking his ribs, breaking other people’s ribs, breaking other people’s faces, dodging bullets, but this is the thing that makes him nervous.

When Matt gently places the gift bag on the table, he can sense Father Lantom’s raised eyebrow from across the room.

“It’s nothing dangerous. Or illegal.”

There’s a crinkle of tissue paper, then:

“You made these?”

“I had a little help. But yeah.”

___

It had been in Foggy’s kitchen, because, as Foggy had pointed out, all that’s in Matt’s kitchen is nearly-empty takeout containers, protein bars, and the sort of knives that are meant for killing people and not for making food. Karen’s kitchen consists of a microwave and a hot plate. Foggy’s kitchen is a magical place that has actual ingredients in the cupboards, and baking sheets and a dozen cookbooks and a cuisinart stand mixer.

Foggy knows how to bake, and he knows how to guilt Matt into baking; Matt has a pretty good palate, what with the super-senses, and he’s in charge of fine-tuning the ratios of spices and salt and sugar. Karen, it turns out, is full of secrets, and has a recipe for chocolate babka that might be in the running for best-ever. Karen brings a bag full of tin cookie cutters, and Matt traces their bright, sharp edges with a fingertip, revealing stars, snowflakes, reindeer. Tiny scuffs and dents reveal that these have been used for years, decades of Christmases. He asks if they are part of a family tradition, and Karen says yes in a way that makes the conversation stutter. Mercifully, Foggy starts discussing the merits of lemon and vanilla extract in sugar cookies (lemon: gross, vanilla: indispensable) before digressing into how Matt is wasting his excellent palate by living off protein bars and coffee, and bemoaning the amount of work it takes to guilt Matt into baking, especially when Matt is immune to Foggy’s sad puppy-eyes.

The truth is, Foggy’s been guilting Matt into baking Christmas cookies since law school. Three years running, post-finals and stumbling in exhaustion, Foggy had herded Matt into the dorm kitchen. Bitching about the subpar equipment and the oven with its busted knobs, and, with rare authoritarian zeal, Foggy had commanded Matt to drink spiked eggnog and roll molasses-ginger dough into five dozen two-tablespoon balls, and dust them with sugar.

Matt was tired enough that he could barely sit down without falling asleep, his stuttering fingers could barely read braille, but he was driven by a new overarching imperative: make Foggy happy. Based on the evidence that he had gathered, baking cookies made Foggy happy, and therefore Matt would assist Foggy in baking cookies. Five hours, five-dozen cookies, and a few too many cups of eggnog later, a new holiday tradition had been born.

Matt likes the smell of Foggy’s baking the most. Cloves and ginger and cinnamon, and the smell of caramelizing sugar. It fills the kitchen like incense. Incense, _incendere_ , “to burn,” Matt’s mind conjugates.

Matt learned, in Catholic school, that the incense burnt in the censer, frankincense and myrrh, represented a prodigal waste of precious material, and a pouring out of unwithholding love. The incense on high holy days gave him nosebleeds, so that the scent of myrrh was forever mixed with the taste of blood at the back of his throat. There was a music to the rhythmic swing of the censer. Here in Foggy’s kitchen, though, there is christmas jazz music playing off of his laptop, and maybe the tinny speakers don’t have the richness of vinyl records but it doesn’t bother Matt very much. The smell of cinnamon and cloves rises toward the low ceiling, out the cracked window and up into the grey blanket of the New York heavens. Matt presses a thumbprint into a jam cookie, and thinks, _pouring out of unwithholding love_.

Foggy’s kitchen is small, like all kitchens in New York City, and there is a lot of touching. Bumping elbows and hips, Karen’s hand on his shoulder as she passes another bowl of raw dough to him, Foggy’s hand between his shoulderblades as he passes behind him with a hot tray of cookies. Karen gives him the frosting-covered spoon to lick. Foggy sticks a warm cookie in his face so Matt can eat it without having to wash his sticky cookie-dough hands. Matt takes it and holds it on his tongue, and thinks, _amen_.

Karen keeps trying to keep him from hot pans and open flames, with the press of a palm through fabric, the touch of fingertips to the back of his hand, his wrist. It’s as though she thinks that he is some delicate, fragile thing. But when he feels a laugh bubbling up at the back of his throat, he bites his lip until he tastes blood and sugar. He is suddenly aware of all his brittle edges, and has to consider that Karen might be closer to the truth that he had thought. When he laughs, he feels the tug of old rib fractures and the ache of new bruises, and beneath it a more bittersweet ache that has nothing to do with physical pain.

Each touch of hands is a bright, warm point, until every inch of his aching skin feels like it is all struck through with stars, a thousand tiny candles in a dark cathedral.

Matt doesn’t realize until a few hours later the way that, under those touches, the tension has melted out of the knotted muscles of his shoulders, the way that his jaw has finally unclenched in what feels like the first time in months, years.

\--

“Don’t worry, Father, I had help, so I didn’t mix up the sugar and salt. Or the flour and the dish detergent.”

And Matt supposes he might understand why someone would be skeptical about the cooking of a blind guy, but Matt can hear Father Lantom crunch into a ginger cookie from across the table, the priest makes a surprised little noise, and Matt feels warm and pleased, and maybe a little smug.

“Matthew, these are _good_.”

Matt smiles, and the priest thinks that it might be the first time he’s seen a true smile on his face in months.

“I know. They’re made with love.”

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah. That happened. Hope you enjoyed it. Realistically, not enough self-loathing in there for Matt Murdock, but it's almost Christmas and I don't have the heart for it, all I want is chocolate babka and gingerbread. Concrit is welcomed, encouraged, and comments feed my wilted little soul.


End file.
